


Love Is A Behaviour

by Asoreleks



Category: Dark Angel
Genre: AU is always OOC, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 21:12:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7590532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asoreleks/pseuds/Asoreleks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With a genius IQ, a certain amount of freedom and spare time, an X-5 is bound to get into trouble. At least, the intangible kind that is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love Is A Behaviour

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first post in a very long time and my first post for AO3. I was really feeling withdrawals from Max and Alec Dark Angel fiction, which seems to have died down a bit recently; so I thought I’d post this little snippet for all the other fans staving off the cravings alongside me. I am working on other fictions in various fandoms that are yet to be posted, but I tend to be paranoid about whether things make sense so I try to finish stories first before I let anyone see them. This is just a one-shot. I’m actually surprised that I could write a one-shot, and that I could write anything that wasn’t very adult.
> 
> [Edited on 05-09-2016 to correct a ridiculous mistake I made that I should have known better not to do, or just plain seen before I posted.]
> 
> Summary: With a genius IQ, a certain amount of freedom and spare time, an X-5 is bound to get into trouble. At least, the intangible kind that is.
> 
> Rated: T for Language.
> 
> Disclaimer: Dark Angel is the property of James Cameron and Charles Eglee. This story is merely an expression of fandom and no profit is made from its distribution. The author only claims ownership over the plot of this fiction and how it is expressed. Any symbols of popular culture referenced herein also belong solely to their respective owners and not to the author of this fan-fiction.

Love Is A Behaviour

Max aimlessly perused the shelves of the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library. Her eyes flitted over titles she had read and titles she had tried to read but given up on. When she’d first come to Seattle, she thought that she could occupy her nights with reading while everyone was asleep. She’d gotten a library passport that allowed her to use the various branches of the city’s public library. She picked the nearest one and had started off systematically taking out books in succession as they lay on the shelves, but after trudging through what her mind felt was drivel too many times, she decided to only read works that actually interested her. 

That was how she’d found her way to the quiet back aisles of the upper floors of this particular locale. It had been a while since she had time for a book with how busy her life had been of late, but that day she felt like she needed one. You could judge a book by its cover, but a book couldn’t judge you.

Exhausting her search in that particular aisle, she turned the corner to be confronted with a sight she wasn’t expecting at all: Alec seated cross-legged on the floor, his arms folded with several books spread out around him- some stacked on top of each other and in his lap. His green-gold eyes watched her expectantly. He’d probably known she was there all along. Max had only the vague awareness that someone else was in the area and that they were male. It irked her to be surprised by his appearance, not only because she should have a better grasp on her transgenic senses, but because she did not want to feel guilty about what had happened the last time she saw him, namely, the fact that Alec had found out that she had been using him as a buffer between Logan and her by pretending that they were in a relationship. 

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” Max remarked noncommittally. She turned her head back to examining the shelves as she progressed slowly towards him.

“Access to a large amount of information for a low fee,” Alec coolly explained. Max glanced down at the book he had in his lap and was confused to find that it had illustrations.

“What are you looking up?” She asked curiously.

“Stuff,” Alec answered vaguely. He was still staring at her and it was beginning to unnerve Max. She thought that perhaps he was going to blow up at her for the whole pretend romance. He had looked- well, she’d never seen Alec look like that before and it made her feel as if she’d lost her inner footing. “I was just thinking about old topics: Gill-Girl and her beau. I was wondering about what they could be made up of and why Manticore made her oviparous. Also, I was wondering if her eggs hatched. It’s a pretty sucky place to birth young- the Washington coastline, in particular the Seattle area. With all the pollution, I wonder if they didn’t just swim off somewhere warmer in the pacific. Or maybe they are cold water creatures.”

“Huh,” Max nodded. “So what are your conjectures? Because you don’t look like you have conclusions yet.”

“Well, they communicate with each other through sonar akin to whale song and yet they have gills. But then I wonder if they’ve been spliced very much at all. What if they were just retro-engineered so that their primitive DNA was switched on? I mean vertebrate embryos look the quite similar up to a certain point and have gill-like parts. What if you just didn’t switch on the genes that led to fully human? And the whale song: you remember the bathing ape documentaries that everyone thought had to be really elaborate hoaxes almost a decade ago? Well, we were made. What if these creatures really exist or did exist and their DNA that was essentially hominid DNA that evolved alongside land-dwelling homo sapiens sapiens was spliced into Manticore soldier DNA? It would probably create a more stable being working with hominid DNA.”

“So they’re perhaps sort of really mermaids?” Max clarified with a slight frown as she paused six feet away, her finger hooked on the spine of a maroon hardcover book that had lost its jacket. “Which then brings you to reading what looks like ‘The Little Mermaid’?”

“I was just curious about the tale so I was reading the Hans Christian Andersen version and then also several cross-examinations into the origins of the story and the semiotics of it.” Alec leaned back against the book shelf he was seated in front of, his eyes still on Max. “She has to change herself at the price of losing her voice- basically giving up her identity, her rights to acceptance and her right to exert her opinion- for a chance at love. But is it love if this ‘prince’ just betrays her so callously in the end? Is unrequited love, Love; or is it just masochistic torture? Is it worth it to try building something with someone you can’t even communicate the truth of yourself to? I mean, in the end she dies and gets the most ridiculous memorial: She’s turned into sea foam! Would you put yourself through the most numbing, lonely despairing hell only to become sea foam, Max?”

“Are you accusing me of something, Alec?” Max asked monotonously. If he was analogising, then he was treading on very thin ice. 

“I think you’d turn to foam, Max,” Alec stated solidly. “I think you’re trading in your voice. But maybe we all have- us transgenics. I already sometimes feel like there is this block in my throat that doesn’t allow me to speak. It’s not the lifetime’s conditioning from Manticore to be nothing but a numbered organic machine. The blockage manifested out here. But I don’t want to turn into foam.”

Max could feel her breath quicken as she listened to her fellow X-5. She was used to arguing with him, but this time she had no words. He’d put her abstract fears into words, and if she adopted the analogy then she knew that she had clung to the Disney outcome as her hope. But just right then, she felt that strange panic she felt sometimes around Alec for what he might say or do next. Except this time, there was no space for a witty deflection or a physical lashing out- her muscles wouldn’t move and her mouth wouldn’t open.

“Max, this time yesterday I was trying to figure out how I was going to ask you out on a date- a real one. But then, last night, I found out that what I hoped might be possible, since we seemed to be getting along and I really hoped that now that you were available that perhaps I wasn’t feeling what I felt all on my lonesome, was worth fuck all since I wasn’t even important enough in your opinion to be anything other than a pawn you used to lie to someone else.

“You said we were people who had a right to live. You gave me a name that belonged to me as if I were one. But then for a moment it felt like you were worse than Manticore, because you made me believe and fall in love with all the ‘good’ you were spouting. The saddest part of it all is that I’m still in love with you, though ‘with’ is not a word that connects us; and against my better judgment I’m still going to go along with this farce because it’s what you want from me and something in me wants to give you everything.”

Max stood there numbed and watching Alec as he continued to sit on the carpeted floor of the pre-pulse library building staring straight back at her, not a trace of emotion on his face. Everything was in his eyes and then it faded into resignation. She had to break eye contact, but it was like that was all the effort she could make. Her strength had suddenly been drained from her and she let herself lean against the tall bookshelf, focusing unseeingly on the bottom row of the next aisle across from her. 

The silence stretched out for an incredibly long minute before Alec slowly gathered the books he had surrounded himself with and got up. As he passed by her, Max felt as though a field of energy had magnetised them and her hand itched to reach out for some unknown reason and her eyes to find his. She knew though that he would pass and nothing would happen. 

Except, he stopped. 

Alec paused right in front of her and after a swell in the awkward tension between them he clunked his books on the shelf next to her head and pulled her close. It wasn’t a tight embrace and it was only his arm around her head burying her face into his chest while the other reached around so that his fingers traced over the back of her forearm. But when the embrace was gone and Alec along with it, Max found that the confusion she’d been pushing down with zeal for so long boiled up to the surface and ran hot out of her eyes. 

…Green-eyed monster. 

@>-`-,----

**Author's Note:**

> Excuse me while I go silently scream into my pillow over my nerves and paranoia over details, etc. I hope at least some of you liked it…¯\\_(*~*)_/¯ 
> 
> Does Alec ever willingly reveal this much? I don't know. But the way I see it, when he does let a part of what he feels show it's like a vicious dagger strike from a wounded creature. Maybe it's self-defense, maybe it's vengeance, maybe he just doesn't know and is winging it.


End file.
